


Beyond Repair

by shootingstarcipher



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Dark, M/M, Self-Harm, Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 15:42:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8897659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shootingstarcipher/pseuds/shootingstarcipher
Summary: Gravity Falls is a place where nightmares come alive and that’s all that Dipper knows about it. His memories are a blur and if there’s one thing he’s sure of, he’s better off staying inside with the man who says he’s taken care of him all his life than out there with a killer on the loose. But pretty soon he starts to realise that the killer behind all the gruesome murders he’s heard about on the news might be even closer than he’d originally thought, and so the strange one-eyed blond boy who keeps visiting him in the middle of the night suddenly seems a lot less like an enemy and more like a friend.





	

the cool summer air bit at his bare arms like a ravenous wild animal snapping its jaws at its latest prey. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this. Maybe the old man had been right about him. He couldn’t survive on his own - what twelve year old boy could? And an injured twelve year old boy who could barely remember anything from beyond a few days ago would surely have even less of a chance of survival than one in pristine physical (and mental) condition?

Letting out a deep sigh of relief, he stopped in a clearing and curled up on the muddy ground with his back resting against a nearby tree as he took the time to consider his options. He wasn’t one to give up easily but sometimes it was the best option and in this case, it did cross his mind that perhaps dying out there in the cold was the best thing that could happen to him. But he did at least have a home. Inside, at home, he was protected. Sometimes his protector lost his temper, but who didn’t have moments like that? Sometimes he did something wrong and then any punishment he was given was justified, surely? Stan was a person who had protected him all his life - given him a home, food, clothes and anything else he needed - and considering that even his own parents hadn’t wanted him enough to keep him, he should have been grateful.

Without Stan, he was going to die - out there in the cold, where darkness seemed to be eternal and every gentle breeze felt like it could swallow him whole. If he stayed here any longer he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to get up again. Collapsing in a muddy patch had been a huge mistake; the cuts on his legs were getting infected and the stinging sensation that already been there was rapidly intensifying - and it didn’t help when he instinctively rubbed at his injuries, rubbing the dirt deeper into his cuts and inadvertently scratching himself.

Hissing in pain, he dug his hands into the ground either side of him and pushed himself up, leaning against the tree to stabilise himself as he almost lost his balance. He hadn’t gotten very far away from the house that was apparently meant to feel like his home but it still took him the best part of an hour to make it back.

From the outside, he could see no lights on inside the house and as he opened the door he found that all that greeted him was darkness and utter loneliness. Maybe Stan had gone out looking for him. Or maybe he’d gone to bed and left him out there to die instead. Whichever it was, Dipper simply trudged in and pushed the thoughts of his inevitable punishment to the back of his mind, climbing the stairs to his bedroom and focusing only on the knowledge that he was going to get a good night’s sleep at home - where he belonged.

This place, this dusty attic with floorboards that creaked even without any pressure being applied to them and cobweb-ridden surfaces that never failed to get in his way whenever he walked into the room… This was his home now. It always had been. Though Dipper didn’t remember, he still knew. After all, why would Stan lie to him?

Sitting down by the window in his favourite corner of the room - the corner he used as a bed, with a thin, flea-bitten blanket forever laid on the floor as a reminder that this was where he slept - and curled up into a ball, resting his head against the wall behind him and hugging his knees to his chest. He was tired all the time and had been ever since the day he’d woken up there in that exact corner of that exact attic room. His thoughts drifted to his memory of that day and he pondered something he often thought about, though he’d never dared voice his considerations to Stan.

When he’d woken up there in that room with little to no memory of anything before that moment, he had had near perfect physical health. And yet, within just a couple of days, his body had become covered in bruises and cuts and unlike the moment he’d regained consciousness after a supposed “bad fall” (which was apparently why he was experiencing memory loss) he was so afraid of the outside world he’d rather continue living there with the cause of his injuries than step outside again.

He told himself it was all his fault, not Stan’s; in fact, Stan frequently told him that exact same thing. His attacks were justified, as far as they were both concerned. He did everything for Dipper and sometimes Dipper messed up. Punishment was therefore deserved. Perhaps the punishments were sometimes a bit harsh, but Dipper accepted it nonetheless. Now that he’d seen how scary the outside world was, he was glad - in a way - to have Stan to look after him. He was grateful, regardless of the pain his punishments caused him. And in his own opinion, he should have been. Trying to leave had been an enormous mistake and an incredibly selfish act he wasn’t proud of.

But he was home now, where he belonged, and that was all that mattered.

Sleep didn’t come easily to him but exhaustion eventually caught up with him and he fell asleep with his head tilted back as he leaned towards the wall, resting against it with his blanket covering the majority of his cold, shivering body. As he closed his eyes, feeling himself drifting off, he wondered whether he’d see his blond visitor again that very night. He didn’t, but perhaps if he’d woken up earlier like he usually did, he would have.

They never spoke. They never even attempted to communicate, but just sat there staring at one another. They didn’t know each other’s names (or at least, Dipper didn’t know his name) and sometimes Dipper wasn’t even sure he was real. He was lonely, after all, having no-one but Stan to talk to and often being too afraid to talk to him, knowing in the back of his mind that one wrong move could mean a broken bone or an excruciating stab wound. So it wouldn’t have been unlikely for his mind to create a friend for him, although it seemed strange that he would create a friend who never spoke to him.

Every night - though Dipper didn’t know what time - he awoke to find the blond boy with one glaring, golden eye sitting across the room from him, staring, watching him with a toothy grin. He must have watched him sleep. He must have broken in and climbed the stairs to the attic room without Stan knowing… Unless, and this was something that crossed Dipper’s mind every now and then, he was a ghost - maybe someone who’d died there in that house as a child not much older than himself and now haunted it. But Dipper always dismissed that thought no matter how much he wanted to believe it. It just wasn’t possible, was it?

That night, however, he slept right through the night and was only woken by something sharp digging deep into his skin, slicing through the side of his face. He yelped on instinct and bit down his lip, blood oozing from the bite and flooding his mouth as his eyes flew open, revealing a familiar, sneering face and a raised knife. It shouldn’t have come to him as a surprise. This was what he deserved - his punishment for running away the night before. He closed his eyes - squeezing them shut - and let it happen, laying there lifeless on the floor while the man who called himself his uncle and guardian continued to slice at his flesh, each swipe of the blade eliciting a flinch and a helpless whimper.

A part of him wanted to fight back and demand more respect than he was being given at present, but the facts were that he just didn’t deserve any better (regardless of what he wanted) and that even if he tried to fight back, the odds were that he wouldn’t have the strength to do it successfully.

Several slashes at his skin later, the knife finally dropped onto the floor with a clatter and a gruff voice growled at him to clean up his mess. Without opening his eyes, Dipper nodded his head. Then came the sound of thudding footsteps walking away from him and down the stairs, leaving him alone again.

His face was bleeding heavily, soaking his clothes and dripping through the cracks of the wooden attic floor. Wrapping the blanket around his face to hopefully stop the bleeding, he got up, ignored the pain and his hunger (as well as his disappointment in failing to catch sight of his mystery visitor the night before), and set to work. Downstairs, on the first floor, was the main bathroom (Stan had an ensuite in his bedroom, not that Dipper was allowed to set foot inside his room) and there Dipper grabbed a flannel from the side of the bath, ran it under the warm tap and began cleaning his injuries.

He started with the cuts on his legs that had gotten muddied the night before, attempting to disinfect it using only water as his cleaning aid. The water stung as it seeped into his cuts but he put on a brave face even though no-one else was around, trying to pretend he didn’t feel it. Then he unwound the blanket from his face and neck and started cleaning the wounds most recently inflicted (as well as ridding his neck of the blood that had dribbled down from the gashes on his face).

But he was well aware that this wasn’t what Stan had meant when he’d told him clean up his mess. He’d meant for to get rid of the blood and mud that dirtied the floors in his house and the stairs too; Dipper had left an accidental trail when he’d come home the night before and now it was his job to clean it up. If he didn’t hurry up and get it done soon, he’d have an even bigger mess to get rid of.

Stan had gone back to bed (presumably, though Dipper didn’t know for certain where he was) so he had the entire ground floor of the house to himself - not for simply enjoying himself though, but for cleaning up the mess he’d made. It took a while to get the mud out of the carpet and even longer to get rid of the blood, but the floor was already so grubby he wondered how Stan even noticed the newer dirt he’d trodden into the carpet. The stairs, thankfully, were easier to clean.

Once he was finished, he trudged into the kitchen to make himself breakfast. Stan never ate breakfast - at least, not in the last week or so. A slice of buttered toast was all Dipper wanted. Just the one. He ate it at the kitchen table, dumped his plate in the sink and took off back up to the attic room, where he spent most of the day reading. That’s all he ever seemed to do. Cleaning, eating, reading and sleeping - as well as whatever Stan commanded him to do.

But he saw very little of his great uncle Stan on this particular day. Usually, if there was anything Stan wanted doing, he’d come up to the attic and yell at him to get it done. But today, that didn’t happen. He didn’t hear from him all day and by the time nightfall came, he wondered whether his uncle had left the house earlier on and been out ever since. His uncle’s absence worried him greatly, bringing back the memory of Stan explaining to him how he’d come to live with him. 

Nobody wanted him. Twelve years ago, when Dipper Pines was born, his parents immediately decided they didn’t want him. And Stan (his grandfather’s brother) had insisted on taking him in out of the kindness of his heart after they’d abandoned him - and besides, nobody else in the family would take him in either. Ever since then, they’d lived together there in that very house in Gravity Falls. Dipper had been home-schooled and taught never to leave the house on his own. He had no friends, according to Stan, because no-one else ever wanted to be around him. He was on his own, ostracised from society, with no-one to depend on but his great uncle Stan. That’s what Stan had told him.

Dipper didn’t like crying. He considered it a sign of weakness. And yet he did it anyway. As he sat there, curled up in the corner of the attic, he felt himself break down and was powerless to stop himself. What if Stan hated him for trying to run away? What if he had left him to teach him a lesson? What if he was never coming back? Well, the answer was simple. If Stan wasn’t coming back, then Dipper would die there alone. He might survive for a few days without him, but what life would he have really been living he had no-one else to share it with or to protect him? He’d either die of starvation, loneliness or be driven man from isolation. That was the fate which awaited him.

“There’s no use crying, kid,” laughed a voice he hadn’t heard before. The sudden noise startled him and he stopped crying momentarily out of shock, wiping away his tears before they started rolling down his cheeks again. He looked up in the direction of where the sound had come from, finding his mysterious blond back in the same corner of the room he was always in, this time with a knife in his hand. He was kneeling on the floor, his long black overcoat draping over the dusty floorboards either side of him, and the blade was pressed again the palm of his free hand, a smile creeping onto his face as it penetrated his flesh. “Hurts, doesn’t it?” the blond mused, golden eye fixed on Dipper. “When he cuts you, I mean.”

Sniffing, Dipper nodded without a single word. He didn’t know where the boy had suddenly appeared from but he wasn’t entirely sure that it mattered. He wasn’t so alone now, even if it was just for a few minutes. “For me,” the stranger went on, interrupting Dipper’s thoughts and cutting him off before he had the chance to speak. “It’s a good thing. You could learn to enjoy the pain too, I bet. You just haven’t tried.”

“What do you mean?” Dipper sniffed, wiping his hand across his face and smearing the salty tears across his arm. Of course he hadn’t tried to enjoy the pain his uncle inflicted on him. He wasn’t meant to and besides, who actually enjoyed agony? It wasn’t something that had ever crossed his mind.

The blond’s smile had widened and he was laughing now, throwing his head back as he forced his knife deeper into the palm of his hand, blood oozing out of the incision and staining his flesh as it dripped its way onto the floor. “I mean,” he smirked, glancing down at his self-inflicted wound momentarily before bringing his gaze back up to meet the brunet’s, “that you assume already you’re not going to like it so when it happens, you don’t. But say… Say you had more control over when it happened… Look at me,” he grinned, gesturing to himself. “I’m as happy as anyone because I’m the one doing it.”

He paused then and licked his lips, looking thoughtful. Then he pulled the blade out from where it had made its home in his flesh, letting out a sound that seemed more than just remotely suggestive as far as Dipper could tell, and crawled over to him, offering him the knife when he reached him. “I’ll show you,” he mused as he moved to sit beside the younger boy. As helpless and as disheartened as he may have been, Dipper couldn’t help but feel intrigued so he took the handle of the knife with his fist and awaited instruction, bracing himself for the pain he knew was on its way.

The blond let out a sigh but his rather unnerving and sinister smile remained fixed in place. “Alright, kid. Don’t be too eager.” Putting his hand on top of Dipper’s, he lowered the knife and held it against the younger’s hand, aiming to cut in the same place as he’d cut himself. Dipper’s body tensed at the blond’s movements and he shut his eyes, afraid of what was about to happen. Strangely enough, the pain wasn’t as bad as he expected it to be.

He was distracted. Someone warm attacked his lips at the same time the knife attacked the palm of his hand. Part of his mind was shrieking in pain yet another part was simultaneously sending signals to lower half his body, telling him to never let the moment end. It was confusing enough as it was without the blond pushing him hard against the wall as the blade drove further into his skin, and without his lips being forced open by the older boy’s tongue as it infiltrated his mouth, exploring every inch and leaving no portion untasted.

It only ended because of his need to breathe. By that time, his hand was dripping with blood and he still had no idea of the blond boy’s identity, though he was certain now that he was in fact real - even though it was still entirely possible that everything that was happening was all in his mind. He hoped to God that it wasn’t, however, and when the blond disappeared without a trace a few moments later, all he could really focus on as he stumbled around trying to secure his blanket around his hand to stop the blood from pouring out of his gaping wound was the tingling feeling in his lips. And, of course, whether he’d ever see the boy again.


End file.
